Did you think this sub was to actually learn anything?

Great idea… really novel.

I’m thinking about ordering a few of these open shelves (36" length), and order transparent boxes for the office supplies.

We’ve made an excel sheet with picture, info, and vendor like you, but the kanban cards would also be a great physical reminder!

Thanks

Thanks, I’ll look into it.

I was thinking the same thing, I was thinking about my younger days working in a grocery store, and being told that “noone buys shit from the back, you have to display it.”

I actually bought this: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07SD3ZM1F/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1. It’s on its way right now, but I’m hoping that if we can make it more visually accessible, it would be easier for whoever would be performing this basic audit.

We’re looking at this as a starting point to better track the status of our inventory.

We’re a contractor with 9 projects currently, mostly for the military. We’re also located on an island, so the vast majority of our equipment and parts comes from off-island, e.g. China, Korea, mainland US by way of the Port of Los Angeles, Philippines, etc… and we use 3 different logistics companies with different tracking systems. We also have 3 warehouses in 2 different parts of the island as well. We’d like to think we’re very proficient at our job, but having a central system to organize where everything is at any given time, ETA, what’s been taken out and used in what project, etc… has been a bit challenging for us. We’ve never faced any major consequences for a few mistakes here or there, but we’re in an industry and project scale where our liquidated damages/penalty fees are in the 10’s of thousands per calendar day. We often joke that if we’re late by even a 3 day weekend, it costs us a new Porsche.

We start small and observe what goes on in our little corner of our office. The coffee runs out w/o anyone noticing, someone goes on a coffee run, oh shoot… did we run out of staplers? Well, Amazon shipments to us take 1-2 weeks, etc… Also, as everything on-island is imported, the office supply stores routinely charge 4-6x what you can buy via Amazon granted with a higher min. order qty.

I dunno… I don’t think is a waste of time, I’m certainly aiming to save time. It would be much more efficient I think for us to just keep a general tab on our office items just once a month (not suggesting we count paper clips one at a time, just a quick glance will do). We can just draft a quick checklist, and just checkmark “YES” or “NO” for replacements. Then I or any other authorized purchaser can just order once monthly for all the needed items instead of addressing each item one at a time when I’m told “Oh no, we ran out of instant ramen.”

I think it’s important to do regularly scheduled housekeeping. I’m pretty confident it will end up saving us time.

Thanks for your comment.